HookThe forty-eight hours that could have stopped the Second World War
On the morning of 7 March 1936 a few thousand German soldiers marched across the bridges of the Rhine into the demilitarised Rhineland. It was a colossal gamble. The German army was still tiny; Hitler had given the troops secret orders to retreat at once if the French army moved against them. 'The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland,' he admitted later, 'were the most nerve-racking of my life. If the French had marched, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs.' The French did not march. They had a larger army sitting a few miles away, a treaty that gave them every right to act — and no will to use either. Hitler had bet that the peacemakers of 1919 no longer had the nerve to enforce their own peace. He won.
That single morning contains the whole of this course. It links the Treaty of Versailles that created the demilitarised zone, the League of Nations that was supposed to police such treaties and did nothing, and the policy of appeasement that let a dictator tear up the post-war order one bluff at a time. The examiner's underlying question runs from the armistice of 1918 to the invasion of Poland in 1939: why did a peace designed to prevent another world war end, twenty years later, in exactly that?
OriginsThe guns fall silent — and the peacemakers disagree
At 11 o'clock on 11 November 1918 the guns stopped. The armistice was signed in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne, and Germany, exhausted and starving under the British blockade, laid down its arms expecting a fair settlement based on President Wilson's principles. It would be disappointed. When the victors gathered in Paris in January 1919, the three men who mattered wanted very different things, and the treaty would be a grudging compromise between them.
Georges Clemenceau of France — nicknamed 'the Tiger' — had watched Germany invade his country twice in his lifetime and had lost nearly 1.4 million Frenchmen in this war alone. He wanted Germany crushed, disarmed and made to pay, with a buffer on the Rhine so it could never invade again. Woodrow Wilson of the United States arrived as an idealist, hoping to build a fairer world rather than punish an enemy. David Lloyd George of Britain sat between them: British public opinion, whipped up in the 1918 'khaki election', screamed to 'make Germany pay' and 'hang the Kaiser', yet privately he feared that a wrecked Germany would breed communism and would be useless as a future trading partner.
OriginsFourteen Points against hard reality
Wilson had set out his vision in January 1918 as the Fourteen Points. The headline ideas were self-determination — that peoples should govern themselves rather than be ruled by foreign empires — plus freedom of the seas, an end to secret treaties, general disarmament and, above all, a League of Nations to settle future disputes by discussion instead of war. To Wilson these were the terms of a just and lasting peace.
To Clemenceau they were dangerously naive. France did not want a fair debate with Germany; it wanted security guaranteed by German weakness. Lloyd George, again, steered a middle course, supporting the League and self-determination in principle while protecting British interests — especially the Royal Navy, which is why he quietly resisted 'freedom of the seas'. The result was that Wilson had to trade away point after point to keep the League alive. Understanding these three clashing aims is essential, because every criticism of the final treaty comes back to them: it was too harsh for Wilson's idealism, not harsh enough for Clemenceau's security, and satisfied nobody completely.
OriginsThe Diktat: what Versailles actually did
The Treaty of Versailles was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 28 June 1919. Its terms are easiest to remember under four headings. Blame: Article 231, the 'war guilt clause', forced Germany to accept sole responsibility for the war — the legal basis for everything else. Reparations: the bill, fixed in 1921, came to 132 billion gold marks, about £6.6 billion. Army: Germany's forces were capped at 100,000 men with no conscription, no tanks, no submarines and no air force, a navy of just six battleships, and the Rhineland permanently demilitarised. Territory: Germany lost about 13% of its land — Alsace-Lorraine to France, the Saar coalfield to the League for fifteen years, and West Prussia and Posen to a rebuilt Poland, splitting Germany in two with the 'Polish Corridor' and turning German Danzig into a free city. Union with Austria (Anschluss) was forbidden and the colonies were handed out as League 'mandates'.
Germans of every party were united in fury. They called it a Diktat — a dictated peace — because Germany had not been allowed to negotiate a single clause and signed only under threat of invasion. They raged that the war-guilt clause was a lie, that the army had been left defenceless, that millions of Germans were now trapped under Polish or Czech rule, and that self-determination had been applied to everyone except them.
A Versailles source question — 'How useful are Sources B and C to an historian studying German reactions to the treaty?' — is won on provenance plus knowledge, not on describing the picture. Suppose Source B is a 1919 German cartoon showing a child labelled 'Germany' being crushed under a giant stone marked 'Versailles', drawn for a Berlin newspaper. Weak answers say what it shows. Strong answers judge its usefulness: it is very useful evidence of German public anger because its origin — a German paper, printed in the raw weeks after signing — is exactly the viewpoint the question asks about, and your own knowledge (the £6.6 billion bill, the lost 13% of territory, the 'Diktat' insult) confirms the feeling was widespread and genuine. Then add the historian's caution: as a hostile cartoon it is designed to provoke, so it reveals emotion reliably but exaggerates the terms for effect. That two-sided verdict — useful for this purpose because of its origin, limited because of its purpose — is the shape AO3 rewards.
InstitutionA parliament of the world — and the members who stayed away
The League of Nations, Wilson's great hope, began work in January 1920 with its headquarters in Geneva. Its aims were collective security (all members acting together against any aggressor), disarmament, upholding the peace treaties and improving living and working conditions worldwide. Its structure ran from a yearly Assembly of all members, through a smaller Council of great powers holding a veto, to a permanent Secretariat, an international Court of Justice at The Hague and specialist agencies including the International Labour Organisation.
It was crippled from birth by who was missing. The United States — whose president had invented it — never joined, because the Senate rejected the treaty and America retreated into isolation. Germany was excluded until 1926 and the Soviet Union until 1934, so for years the League spoke for the victors alone. Worse, it had no army. Against an aggressor it could offer only three escalating weapons: moral condemnation, economic sanctions, or collective military action by members' own forces — and the last of these was never once used. Its 1920s record was genuinely mixed: real successes came through the agencies (Fridtjof Nansen's work resettling refugees, campaigns against typhus and slavery, better working conditions) and in small disputes like the Åland Islands (1921) and stopping Greece invading Bulgaria (1925). But it failed whenever a determined power ignored it, as when Poland seized Vilna in 1920 and Mussolini bombarded Corfu in 1923.
InstitutionPeace built outside the League
Because the League looked weak, the great powers increasingly made peace among themselves instead. The Locarno treaties of 1925 were a genuine breakthrough: Germany voluntarily accepted its western borders with France and Belgium, easing the fear that it would seek revenge, and the 'Locarno honeymoon' allowed Germany to join the League as a respected power the following year. For a few years European diplomacy felt hopeful.
The Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928 seemed to crown that hope: sixty-two nations, including Germany, solemnly renounced war 'as an instrument of national policy'. But it exposed the fatal flaw of the whole inter-war peace. The pact contained no mechanism whatsoever to enforce its fine words — no army, no sanctions, nothing but a promise. When the promises were broken a few years later, there was nothing behind them. Locarno and Kellogg–Briand show examiners a period of real optimism; the trick is to see that the optimism rested on goodwill alone, and goodwill evaporated the moment the world economy collapsed.
CollapseManchuria and Abyssinia: the League destroyed
Two crises in the 1930s exposed the League as powerless against a great power willing to use force. In September 1931 Japan used a staged explosion on a railway near Mukden as a pretext to invade Manchuria, a resource-rich Chinese province, and set up a puppet state. The League took a year to send the Lytton Commission, which mildly condemned Japan in 1933 — whereupon Japan simply walked out of the League and kept Manchuria. No sanctions were imposed; no force was used.
The Abyssinian crisis of 1935 finished the job. When Mussolini's Italy invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia), the League imposed economic sanctions — but pointedly left out oil, coal and steel, and left the Suez Canal open to Italian troopships, for fear of pushing Mussolini into Hitler's arms. Then Britain and France were caught secretly plotting, in the leaked Hoare–Laval Pact, to hand most of Abyssinia to Mussolini anyway. Italy conquered the country by 1936. The collapse of the League now had obvious causes: the absence of the USA and other great powers, the self-interest of Britain and France during the Depression, decisions that needed slow unanimous votes, and above all no army to back its words. After Abyssinia, no aggressor took it seriously again.
An interpretations-style question on why the League failed is a chance to weigh causes rather than list them. One line of argument blames structural weaknesses baked in from 1919: no US membership, no army, the need for unanimous decisions, sanctions that hurt League members as much as the target. Another blames circumstance and choice in the 1930s: the Great Depression turned every nation inward and selfish, and Britain and France repeatedly put their own interests first, most damningly in the Hoare–Laval Pact. The high-level judgement links the two: the structural flaws made the League fragile, but it was the deliberate choices of its leading members during the Manchurian and Abyssinian crises that actually killed its authority. Anchor each side to a fact — no US Senate ratification for the structural case, the leaked Hoare–Laval plan for the choices case — and you turn a general point into a substantiated argument.
Road to warHitler tears up Versailles — one bluff at a time
Hitler's foreign policy aims were open and consistent: destroy the hated Versailles settlement, rearm, achieve Anschluss with Austria, unite all German-speaking peoples, and win Lebensraum ('living space') by conquest in the east. He pursued them by testing how much the democracies would tolerate. In 1933 he pulled Germany out of the League and the disarmament talks. In March 1935 he openly announced conscription and a new air force, the Luftwaffe — a flat breach of Versailles that drew nothing but protest. Astonishingly, Britain then signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in June 1935, permitting Germany a navy up to 35% of the Royal Navy's size, effectively endorsing German rearmament and undermining any united front.
Then came the remilitarisation of the Rhineland on 7 March 1936, the gamble described above, breaking both Versailles and Locarno while France stood by. Each success drew Hitler new friends and made the next step easier. He built an alliance system to match: the Rome–Berlin Axis with Mussolini in October 1936, the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan against communism a month later, and the full military 'Pact of Steel' with Italy in 1939. With every unpunished move, the man who had begun with a defenceless army grew stronger and bolder.
Road to warAppeasement, Munich and the last steps to war
British policy under Neville Chamberlain from 1937 was appeasement: giving in to Hitler's 'reasonable' demands to avoid another catastrophic war. It is easy to sneer at it, but the reasons were serious — the horror of the First World War's casualties, armed forces not yet ready, an isolationist USA, worries about defending a global empire, a widespread belief that Versailles had been unfair to Germany anyway, and a fear that the real enemy was Soviet communism. After Hitler absorbed Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938, he demanded the Sudetenland, the German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia. At the Munich Conference of 29–30 September 1938, Britain, France, Germany and Italy — with the Czechs themselves shut out — handed the Sudetenland to Hitler. Chamberlain flew home waving his 'piece of paper' and promised 'peace for our time'.
It lasted six months. In March 1939 Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, proving his promises worthless and killing appeasement; Britain now guaranteed Poland. Then came the bombshell: on 23 August 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Nazi–Soviet Pact, a non-aggression deal whose secret clauses carved up Poland between them. Freed from the danger of a war on two fronts, Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Two days later, on 3 September, Britain and France declared war. The historians' argument over responsibility — was it Hitler's long-held plan, or an opportunist exploiting the appeasers' blunders and the injustices of Versailles? — begins here.
The 'responsibility for war' theme is perfect interpretation territory, because historians genuinely disagree. The traditional view makes Hitler the sole author: a fanatic following a fixed plan of conquest set out in Mein Kampf, whom appeasement merely fed. A famously provocative alternative, argued by A. J. P. Taylor in 1961, cast Hitler as an ordinary, opportunist statesman who mainly exploited the blunders of others — the appeasers who kept giving way and the flawed peace of 1919. In the exam, don't crown a winner and stop; explain why the interpretations differ (Taylor was deliberately challenging the post-war consensus, and used different evidence and emphasis) and then judge with your own knowledge. Test each claim against events: Hitler's consistent aims and the timing of each aggressive step support the 'plan' reading, while the Rhineland retreat orders and the repeated failure of Britain and France to act support the 'opportunist' reading — leading to a balanced verdict that Hitler drove events but the democracies' choices decided how far and how fast he got.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
This is a Paper 1 wider world depth study, and its signature question type is the source set, testing AO3 (analyse and evaluate sources). The 12-mark 'How useful are Sources B and C to an historian studying…?' is not asking whether the sources are 'true'. Judge each on content (what it says, tested against your own knowledge) and provenance (who made it, when, where and why). The strongest answers turn provenance into a usefulness verdict: a hostile German cartoon of 1919 is highly useful evidence of German anger precisely because of its origin and purpose, even though — indeed because — it is one-sided. Reach a supported judgement on each source for the specific enquiry named in the question, and always fold in contextual knowledge; a source answer with no own-knowledge cannot reach the top level.
The other questions are AO1/AO2. The 8-mark 'write an account' wants an analytical narrative — sequence events to show cause leading to consequence (how the Sudeten crisis became the Munich Agreement), not just a list of what happened. The 16-mark 'how far do you agree?' essay wants a substantiated judgement: state your line at the start, argue both for and against the given statement with precise evidence, and finish with a genuine verdict on 'how far'. Whatever the question, marks track precision — reach for the exact date, treaty term or figure (7 March 1936, the 100,000-man army limit, the Munich Conference of 29–30 September 1938) rather than a vague phrase, because at GCSE specificity is what separates the top two levels from the middle.